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Project Proposal
Project Proposal (25 points) Due by 4 pm Wednesday, 9/14 In the Proposal you should discuss the technologies that your team plans to evaluate in the Research Report. Your Proposal should discuss the structure and management of your team; you should designate a team leader and any other roles that team members will play. Your Proposal should include a description of your contingency plans. You should also include your schedule and your plans for reviewing and editing your Report. Your Proposal should be a response to the Request for Proposal (RFP) that follows and should use the format of the RFP as a model for the format of your Proposal. To: Dr. Flammia From: Team 2 Re: Request for Proposal (RFP) for Research Report Date: September 14, 2011 The purpose of this Request for Proposal (RFP) is to request that each team submit a detailed and specific Proposal describing all aspects of the team’s plans for completing the Research Report. The Proposal should convince Dr. Flammia that your team has a well-developed and carefully designed management plan, a realistic schedule, appropriate tools, and strategies for addressing the challenges related to virtual collaboration. Your Proposal must include these sections: Introduction, Description of Report Content, Team Structure and Management Plan, Contingency Plans, Schedule (including a Gantt chart), Collaborative Tools, Review and Evaluation Plans, and Conclusion. Each section should include detailed information, and may include attachments, if necessary. Every Proposal must include a Gantt chart as an attachment to the Schedule section. Introduction (Batul) This is a proposal from Team 2 requesting an approval to continue with our plans for carrying out our virtual team project. The technologies we are planning to research are blogs, wikis, instant messages, VoIPs and Emails. Description of Report Content (Batul) We feel that some of the technologies that are important when collaborating a virtual project with a group are blog, wikis, instant messages, VoIPs and Emails. Our team plans to research, test and analyze, these technologies for our virtual project. Blogs can prove to be important for collaboration in a group project, as the member of the group can share information in a journal format. Blogs can be visited at anytime and also be categorized. Blogs allow journal entries that let you combine text, images and hyperlinks. Wikis are another collaborative took that can be used for virtual projects. Wikis allow for real time updates. Wikis allow data to be more secure. Instant messaging is another important tool when it comes to collaborating virtual products. It allows for conversations in real time without any delay in uploading and response. Instant messaging can be done through various different softwares and even through browsers without having to download anything to the computer. Team meeting can also be held over VoIP which stands for Voice over IPs. VoIP can also be a great tool for collaboration where meeting can be held where via speaking. VoIP have an advantage over telephone conference meetings as they don’t have as much of a price tag especially when holding international meetings. Email is another form of communication that can be used when collaborating virtual meetings. Using emails does not require all the members of the team to be available at the same time. Emails allow the whole team to share files, documents, pics and text at the same time. Team Structure and Management Plan (Hope) In this section you should describe the division of labor within your team, specifically stating which responsibilities each team member will have. You should indicate which team member(s) is going to serve as the team leader and designate any other roles that team members will fulfill (editor, troubleshooter, technical support person). You are only required to designate a team leader, the other roles are optional. You should clearly delineate the responsibilities associated with each position. Be sure to mention specific actions and duties. For example, do not merely say, the team leader will communicate with the team. Instead say, the team leader will send email reminders to all team members before each meeting. You should clearly state which team member will be responsible for which set of meeting minutes (each team member must write one set of minutes). You should also specify which technology each team member is responsible for researching. Contingency Plans (Gina) In effort to maintain the strongest communication lines,team members have all signed up with Google Talk to utilize the instant messaging function. The instant messaging function can be utilized at twenty four hours a day to communicate with team mates in real time. Team members will be meeting weekly, at minimum in Google Talk chat rooms to discuss progress, questions, and concerns. Team members can call for additional team meetings as they see necessary. Team members are utilizing the course-mail function through Web-Courses to have the ability to E-mail with other team members. All team members have exchanged phone numbers in case they are unable to access a computer so they can have voice or text communications. Team members will back up their project drafts on flash drives to circumvent loss of work due to computer crashes or other technical issues. Team members will also upload their drafts to Google Docs so their work can be stored and accessed by all teams at their convenience. Hard deadlines have been implemented in the schedule for team members to complete their research and drafting.The schedule has been padded with a generous amount of days during the design, editing, and final revision phases that can be used in the event of technical issues or deadline extensions. Team members will try and resolve all differences amongst themselves. In the event that team members can not resolve their differences they will present their issues to the team leader. The team leader will then present the issue to the team as a whole, in the team meeting setting. At this time a majority vote will be taken. The decision of the vote will be deemed the best course of action for the project and implemented as such. In the event that a team member is unsatisfied with the project direction, disagreeing with the vote on course of action, they will lodge their grievance in the meeting setting in front of all team members and forward it to the professor. Schedule (Gina) The team will be following the schedule outlined in the appendix. The project will begin with a one week planning phase. This will be followed by a three week period for members to complete their topic research. Team members will then enter a two week drafting phase. All initial team member drafts will be submitted to the editor by 10/31. A one week design phase will overlap this time period. The project will then be given a one week period of editing. After completion of editing the peer editing phase will occur for the duration of one week. The last nine days will be allocated for final revisions and design changes. There will be weekly meetings tentatively scheduled for Wednesday evenings. Team members will also rotate the responsibility of completing meeting minutes to be turned in on 9/23, 10/7, 10/21, and 11/4. One progress report will be completed for them team by October 12th. Collaborative Tools (Jennifer) The tools our team will be using for regular group communication are Instant Messaging and E-mail. Team meetings are weekly scheduled online sessions that allow members to share information instantaneously using collaborative software. The group has chosen to use Google Chat for team meetings. Team members have also acquired Google Talk IDs to utilize the Instant Messaging function any time during the project to communicate live with one another. The team is utilizing email provided through Web-Courses as the most effective way to contact each other. Team members have exchanged personal emails addresses as a back up contact method. This will allow us to send reminders for dates for deadlines, meetings, and any other needed communication. Email will also be used as a mechanism for the team to share drafts of their assigned parts for feedback from other members and to submit drafts to the team editor. The group will also be experimenting with each of our selected tools of research through out the course of the project. Instant messaging will get the largest use as it will be the software used for team meetings and group communications. Email will be the form of communication away from real time the group will be using. The group will create a blog for members to experiment with for their studies. The blog will be accessed by all members to create different postings at their own pace, not in real time. A wiki will allow the members of the group to add and edit postings on the page at any time. The group will use VoIP to determine how well it works for the virtual team environment. Review and Editing Plans (Victoria) The review process for the research report involves two separate reviews from within our group and one outside review. All team members will submit their parts of the project by October 31st to Google Documents for our editor, Hope Diehl, to makes any corrections in grammar, writing style and tone so the report is cohesive. After the report is edited by Ms. Diehl, it will be reviewed a second time by our coordinator, Victoria Jackson, to make sure the project follows the instructions laid out in our course materials. If there are corrections to be made, the individual portions will be returned to the original author for amending. Both of these reviews and any needed amendments will be completed by November 7th. Once Ms. Diehl and Ms. Jackson are satisfied with the papers content, style and tone, we will e-mail the completed report to Group 1 in Technical Communication for the Virtual Workplace and they will conduct the peer review on our report. We will give group one until November 14th to return the report with any comments. After the peer review is completed and any changes made, the report will be resubmitted to Google Documents for the entire group to give their stamp of approval. Conclusion (Victoria) We are committed to researching blogs, wikis, instant messages, VoIPs and Email and evaluating their usefulness in virtual collaboration. Each of us has chosen one of the aforementioned technologies to research it and explain it in detail to the team. These technologies are all useful in different way to virtual teams. Blogs and wikis can be created and accessed online at any time by the team members. Instant messages and VoIP both allow for real time communication between members and e-mail is a familiar way for teams to communicate with one another. By using each of these technologies in order to communicate with one another while researching them will enhance our ability to evaluate their effectiveness. As a team we have already held meetings, created a management plan and schedule and chosen the tools to evaluate. We are all committed to the schedule submitted with this request and feel we can create an informative and useful evaluation of the technologies.